Magical Rites

It wasn’t an easy feat to stare through an illusion, John learned. When he tried, John found that he was either looking through something that seemed to be a cloud of smoke and not actually a person, or he was looking at the glistening outline of a body as it hid in light. Otrov’s actual form looked a lot like the picture he had seen of Alanah… if Alanah had been shining like some kind of angel with skin made out of mirrors and the rogue had been covered in a suit of knives instead of a button-up shirt, suspenders, and slacks. Her white shirt, suspenders, and black pants were still there. They hadn’t been removed by any means, they were just… covered in certain areas. A vest of scales and knives made from ivory and steel covered most of the rogue’s exposed torso. Her pants, while clean and form-fitting, were not actually used to improve her look. Instead, her legs were strapped from her thighs to her ankles with various types of holsters and sheaths for all of the knives, guns, and vials filled with unidentified liquids that she carried with her.

Her facial features were just as angular and prominent as her picture had shown them to be, though it was hard to see her high cheekbones and soft, squarish jawline in all the light radiating off her. Her thin eyebrows and sapphire eyes became easier to identify over time as John continued to stare at her, but the light glinting off her form never truly vanished. Her black gloves and black shoes squeaked as the rogue jerked in place while John inspected the curly, dark locks on her head, and Otrov growled.

“You’re not searching for me anymore,” she grumbled, and John shook his head. Her head dipped as the assassin focused on her own spell, and the light surrounding her form became almost blindingly bright for a moment… but she didn’t disappear again. The illusion she had created of herself seemed to solidify, aside from the ghostly way her copy radiated fog, but John turned completely to face the rogue he had been trying to talk to this entire time. When she stepped away to come at John from another surprising angle, his gaze followed her as she moved. “What just happened?” she asked, and John shrugged.

“Does it matter? Even if it does, do you really think that I’m going to answer that?” he asked, and the rogue scowled at him. He didn’t wait for her to speak. Instead, he answered his own question when he saw her open her mouth. “I won’t,” he stated. “I won’t be your pawn either. I want assurances that you’ll let them go, or the logical thing for me to do now is assume that you weren’t ever going to stick to your word in the first place. If you’re not ready to strike a deal, then I have no reason to try and kill an innocent man. The best thing to do is run and hide.”

“You can’t hide from this.” Despite the fact that he could see Otrov’s mouth moving, it wasn’t her voice that he heard first. The first voice he heard was masculine and laced with the cadence of an old accent. It was familiar and weak, about as weak as it had been the last time that John had heard Michel’s voice, but close enough to the real thing to cover him in goosebumps. He could hear his friend’s rasping breath in his ear as Otrov closed her eyes and focused again… but John didn’t turn to look at him. He fell back onto his use of Gamer’s Mind once more, and then turned and began walking away. “You-”

The illusion of Michel stopped speaking as soon as Otrov noticed John walking over to the edge of the barrier. It took John a couple of moments to actually find the wall separating him from the alleyway he had been standing in before he was pulled into the trap barrier, but not long at all for the Gamer to begin putting dents and cracks into the side of it. The misshapen gravel road he and Otrov had been standing on groaned as John started the lengthy process of physically beating his way out of the barrier and then cracked as another voice exhaled into his other ear.

“John, stop.” The sound of his mother speaking to him nearly made him freeze, but one glance at the source of the sound was all he needed to know that it was just another illusion. “John,” she said his name warningly, and he ignored her. “John, I-”

The barrier cracked again, splitting the air open in front of John to reveal a thin white fissure floating in place, and out of the opening, the sound of muffled thunder boomed into the barrier with them. Rain and howling wind followed, betraying the sudden change of weather outside the barrier, but John didn’t turn away. If that wasn’t an illusion too, then he could brace himself for the oncoming cold. He couldn’t, however, brace himself if-

“Fine.” It wasn’t an illusion that spoke this time. Alanah’s voice came in the form of a growl as John finally yanked open a hole in the barrier large enough for him to slip through… and then stopped when he heard her words. He turned back to face the rogue carefully as the light obscuring her slowly faded, and John finally let out the breath he didn’t know he had been holding. Otrov cocked an eyebrow at him, hearing him exhale so heavily, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she reached up into her dark, scaly vest and pulled out a single thick sheet of parchment. It wasn’t paper or an envelope. The material that the contract was made out of seemed to be stronger than that, and it was already covered in words by the time that John got it. “Sign it,” she ordered him, and John ignored her again.

It didn’t matter how impatient or how happy he was to get her to do something like this. John refused to sign a magical contract without reading it, especially when making one with someone from a group of necromancers. It turned out to be a good rule to follow. The first draft of their potential deal included a multitude of outcomes that he didn’t like or want, most of which ended with him owing either his soul or a couple hundred lifetimes of indentured servitude to Otrov. The second draft wasn’t much better.

Hours passed with the two of them locked inside that trap barrier, where John carefully took the time to read and reread every copy and contract that Otrov threw out at him. Anytime he found something wrong with the current one, he’d point it out to the rogue to have her touch the parchment and change it. Over time, she tried to sneak in a few more changes that specified an ending that seemed rather poor to John, but his attempts to neutralize such tricks were able to protect him for the most part. In the end, he didn’t have the patience for a long-worded contract and told Otrov to shorten it down as much as possible. She agreed… eventually, but refused to completely remove the parts that involved him losing his soul if he were to fail at killing Daniel. She told him that she was putting herself at risk by signing such a deal with him, and would end up in far too much trouble if her Magus were to get his hands on that paper, so if he wanted a deal, she needed assurances that it wouldn’t come back to hurt her if John were to be captured or interrogated.

In a way, she wanted to give him something like a metaphorical cyanide capsule. Before he could be used against her, if he was captured, the boundaries of the contract would activate and yank his soul out of his body. He’d be left physically intact, but not technically conscious or even really alive. In return, John asked for a constraint like that as well for her. She was bound to let the Cabal’s victims go, but if she didn’t release them freely out into Springfield or into a kingdom to go safely on their way, then her soul was to be stolen away as well and given to John. She couldn’t release anyone and then let another Qabalist hunt down the escapees. They had to be given their freedom.

Also, neither person wanted to be bound by a contract that stated one of them had to be the person to complete the task set before them. If someone else got the killing blow on Daniel, John’s duties were to be considered complete, and if someone other than Alanah opened up all the Cabal’s mana tanks in Springfield and let them walk away, then she had done her part as well.

In the end, it wasn’t a perfect contract. There were a lot of holes left in it, but the amount of freedom it gave each person to complete their task was something that John wanted either way. In a strange way, it reminded him of the quests that his abilities gave him. His objective was to kill Daniel. The reward was the release of hundreds of Cabal prisoners. His time limit to get it done demanded that he finished it before tomorrow night; if midnight came around and Daniel wasn’t dead, then he lost his soul. If he had been paying attention to his pop-ups, he might have noticed that he had actually received one for it. Instead, he chose to continue ignoring them and focused on making sure that Otrov was stuck to the same time limit...

… and then they both signed their names on it.